Kanye West Is Releasing a Videogame About His Late Mother

Kanye West: Musician, fashion designer… videogame creator.

“I worked on a videogame and I wanted to show y’all,” he said Thursday, during the livestreamed release party for his new album The Life of Pablo. “The idea of the game is, my mom is traveling through heaven.”

The stream then cut to a short trailer of the game, called Only One, sharing the name with a track released by West in late 2014 in collaboration with Paul McCartney. It depicts a winged woman—the late Donda West, who passed away in 2007, by all indications—soaring through a painterly cloudscape heaven. It looks awfully nice, actually.

This isn’t the first time West has discussed making a game about his late mother—he referred to the project last year during a radio interview—but this is the first concrete indication of the project’s existence. No information yet on platform or release date, though the trailer ended by promising that the game was “coming soon.”

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This New Animated Lego StarWars Short Looks Legit

Looks like we won’t have to wait until next year’s Episode VIII to see our favorite characters from Star Wars: The Force Awakens again. OK, that’s only kind of true. If you consider “watching animated Lego versions of” characters “seeing” them, then you’ll definitely be seeing them again soon—like three-days-from-now soon. If not, then you’ll probably still be waiting until 2017.

The new animated short Lego Star Wars: The Resistance Rises—Poe to the Rescue, which will debut Monday on Disney XD, will feature, yes, Poe Dameron as well as Kylo Ren, Captain Phasma, BB-8, and others. (C-3PO! Hey girl!) The short is the first episode in the Resistance Rises series, which explains what happened in the events leading up to the First Order attack on Jakku in The Force Awakens.

Also, it looks really fun. Just look at little itty bitty Kylo Ren stomping off of that ship!

Check out a preview of the short, which will premiere after Monday’s Gravity Falls finale, above.

Angry Nerd: Enough with the Celebrity Cameos Already!

Zohar Lazar

It pains me to say this, but I have a hunch that, much like the no-opening-the-Magic-packs policy at my local game shop, this month’s Zoolander sequel is going to displease me. The only thing that kept Ben Stiller’s version of 2001 from becoming an Academy Awards juggernaut and Criterion Collection shoo-in was the endless parade of “as themselves” celeb appearances like Fred Durst and Posh Spice, who made the movie feel like a two-hour Hollywood Squares. Yet, Zoolander 2 appears to down the ante by making the cameos even more central: It’s the assassinations of national treasures like Justin Bieber that serve as the movie’s plot-shaped sleeping pill. I’m tired of people writing celebs into their films as a doofus ex machina to goose the story with random absurdity. Sure, the celebs are hoping to look like they’re in on the joke—but when they’re already descending into self-parody on Facebook and Insta­gram, why would I go to the multiplex to get it? Thankfully, the show Colony inspires a fix: All we need to do is turn Malibu into a heavily fortified prison for desperate Z-listers, whom we’d lure with the promise of a self-deprecating walk-on role in a new Judd Apatow flick. But here’s the catch: no media coverage whatsoever. After they turn feral (I give it 36 hours), it’ll be time to turn the cameras back on—because then we’ll have a real blockbuster on our hands!

We’re Getting a New Harry Potter Book, Based on the Play

Pottermore

J.K. Rowling’s literary universe continues to grow. The two-part stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which picks up the story of The Boy Who Lived 19 years after the series of seven novels, debuts in London this summer. But in case you couldn’t snag one of those very limited tickets in England, now everyone else will be able to enjoy the Rowling-created, Jack Thorne-written tale. Rowling’s literary and brand management agency The Blair Partnership announced today that the script for both parts of Cursed Child will be published as a print hardcover and ebook on Harry Potter’s birthday, July 31.

But wait, there’s more! Apparently this “special rehearsal edition” will only be available for a limited time, after which it will be replaced by a “definitive collector’s edition” sometime in the future. So start collecting all your galleons, sickles, and knuts, because you’re going to need them to keep up with the rapid expansion of the Harry Potter Universe, which includes forthcoming illustrated editions of every novel, the film adaptation of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and a 20th-anniversary celebration of the first book in 2017.

D’oh! Crash: The History of VR on TheSimpsons

dongxipunata/Reddit

Thank you, Reddit. Once again you’ve cooked up something small, but glorious. Apropos of nothing yesterday, “dongxipunata” posted the above image to the r/Oculus subreddit. It tracks the eight (and counting moments) that VR appeared on The Simpsons, beginning with 1993’s unanimously beloved “Marge vs. the Monorail”—the year after Lawnmower Man hit theaters—and continuing through 2014’s not-entirely-beloved episode “Days of Future Future.”

When we first saw this, we admit, we assumed that dongxipunata had used Simpsons image-search engine Frinkiac to compile the list. However, searching for “virtual” proved fruitless, and “VR” turned up little more than an episode of Itchy & Scratchy, so we’re just gonna say the redditor in question knows magic.

Regardless of the image’s provenance, though, it holds up a mirror to what was actually going on vis a vis the abortive VR craze of the ’90s. Virtual-reality research at the time led to mainstream awareness, which led to speculative fiction like Snow Crash, which in turn led to a host of ’90s movies and TV shows that had fun with the concept—from The 13th Floor to Mad About You to Murder She Wrote. Of course, nothing came of attempts to productize the technology that first go-round, and it wasn’t until the Oculus Rift first popped up in 2012 that VR became a watchword once again. (That doesn’t explain the 2011 episode, but since it was one of the Simpsons’ futuristic holiday episodes, it’s a little less curious.) Of course, you know what that means: we’re fast moving toward inevitable episode titles like “Brockulus Rift” and “D’oh! Crash.”

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